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Come Sunday

Last week I watched the recently released film, Come Sunday, on Netflix. The movie is about COGIC bishop, Carlton Pearson’s, slow but sure movement toward what is identified as universal reconciliation.

What is universal reconciliation?This belief can be conflated with general universalism, but it is different. Universal reconciliation (UR)—or Christian universalism—is the belief that all things will ultimately be reconciled to God through Christ. Not some things, not most things, but all things—including all of humanity. On a side note, one of the stronger theological works to present this view is The Evangelical Universalist, authored by Gregory MacDonald (pen name for Robin Parry).

Following our watching of Come Sunday, my wife and I had a great conversation about the topic of “hell” and, so, I wanted to offer some brief thoughts here on the blog.

I will say up front that I don’t personally believe UR is tenable from the Scriptures. [Whew, I may have just avoided the casting of stones from some readers!] But, what is understandable is that UR, on some level, is probably a reaction against what we might call the “traditional view” of hell. This view is known as eternal conscious torment (ECT).

ECT is the view that all sinners who do not believe in Christ will be sent to a specific place called hell (wherever that place may actually be) and it is there that unbelievers will receive conscious punishment for their sin for all eternity. It will never stop, but will go on and on.

And on and on.

And on and on.

Forever.

Proponents of this view would offer that God has the right to do such, for a) he is perfectly holy and b) we are deeply wicked and sinful. Thus, the only way to appease God’s wrath for our wickedness is either 1) to believe upon Christ and his sacrifice for sins on the cross or 2) receive our due punishment of being consciously tormented forever.

That’s the traditional and more prevalent view of the day.

What Pearson and many others are reacting against is this idea of torment forever. How could the one true God, ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ, torment people forever? How could the God whom is Love not make a way for all people at all times to repent of sin and enter into his joy, even after death?

And that’s what we get in Pearson’s story told in Come Sunday.

However, there is a small (or large) problem here.

I don’t believe UR is unbiblical because I can, subsequently, find enough verses across Scripture to support the traditional view of hell. Rather I see this view—along with the traditional view of ECT—as falling short of Scripture for one major reason: we fail to read and study the Scriptures within their ancient narrative context.

That’s the biggie for me.

For both the UR view that Pearson holds to and the ECT view that so many evangelicals espouse, I believe these views work within a more modern framework rather than those of the ancient biblical text we have. What I mean is that we fail to grasp what certain words and concepts meant for the writers back then, terms as such as sheol, hades, gehenna, destruction, lake of fire, and others.

This is important when engaging with both UR and ECT views, mainly because ECT carries such weight in the church and UR comes as a strong reaction against it. Yes, both look to work from Scripture. But I believe if we get into the nitty-gritty details of the Bible—with help from some solid resources that help us understand the ancient context—we will find both views fall short of what is presented in Scripture.

In adjusting our study, we’ll start to uncover that sheol and hades do not refer to a place of punishment, but rather to the grave itself, the place of the dead. That’s because death was the punishment pronounced on man in the beginning—when you eat from it [the tree] you will certainly die (Gen 2:17).

Not only that, but in studying the word gehenna (the word we translate as “hell”), we might be surprised to note that the word shows up all of 12 times in the the New Testament – 11 by Jesus in the synoptic Gospels, 1 in the epistle of James. And, what’s of even more interest may be that the Valley of Gehenna was an actual place existing just outside the city of Jerusalem, a place where the city’s waste was burned. All of a sudden the phrase “fire of gehenna” makes sense in passages like Matt 18:9. This fire was unending and it destroyed all that was thrown in it.

Sheol (Hebrew) or hades (Greek) was a reality for all humanity. All would die (and we are grateful for resurrection through Christ!).

Gehenna was a real place where the unfaithful would find themselves burning as Rome ransacked the city and destroyed the temple in the late 60s AD (in the same vein that the unfaithful experienced under Babylonian destruction).

The lake of fire, which I believe is different from gehenna, is the final reality for unbelievers. But it is called the second death for a reason (Rev 21:8). The first death, of which we all partake, does not involve conscious torment. The second death will neither.

In all, Come Sunday was a good film (taking some license around the actual events of Carlton Pearson, as all films will). I find myself hurting with Pearson as he grapples with the biblical text, considers pastoral questions in the midst of his congregation, and feels the searing pain of losing his closest friends. And there is an honest pull in me at times that desires universal reconciliation to be a real possibility.

But I think our better option is to grapple with the ancient text of Scripture as it comes to us from the authors and form our views on their grounds rather than our own. This also includes a guard against swinging the pendulum so far to the other side in reaction to a prominent position that doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of Scripture.

If we do this, I believe both eternal conscious torment and universal reconciliation will not be plausible.

4 thoughts on “Come Sunday”

But “the lake of fire” is not the second death of PEOPLE. It is the death OF death, as it says that Hell and death are thrown into the lake of fire, as these are the “last enemies”. I believe the Lake of Fire is God’s eternal love and passion for humanity, that will never let even ONE sheep be lost, but will see ALL, no matter how long it takes, turn to Him in love. If we can believe in eternal TORMENT (not that YOU do, but I mean in general), why cannot we believe in eternal LOVE that never gives up? The “2nd death” is our death to the false things we believe about God in our lives that caused us to not embrace Him. This “death” is happening all over the world every day and will continue to happen into eternity.

The Jews believed in the final reconciliation of ALL things. Jesus never corrected that belief. All of his warnings about destruction were in regards to the actual physical destruction of Jerusalem and the the temple and all of those who would rally around it to “save” it.

I thought your line at the end was somewhat telling…

“This also includes a guard against swinging the pendulum so far to the other side in light of a prominent position that may stand up to the scrutiny of Scripture.”

Heavens, we wouldn’t want a God who is ALL light, in whom there is NO shifting shadow of anger, fear or exclusion. People simply can’t handle a God who’s THAT good.

I’ll read over the more detailed posts you linked to and may have some more to say there.

Hey Ken. Yes, I knew you had moved to a UR position. I think it may be a challenge to argue that the lake of fire is God’s eternal love. We have not only what is said in Rev 20:14 (about death & hades) but also 20:15 and 21:8 (concerning the wicked). Death is seen as judgment in Scripture, including the second death. And, though you don’t mention it, in 21:25 where it says the city’s gates will never shut, this wouldn’t speak of allowing the unrighteous to come in whenever they repent in the future (for they have received the second death), but rather it speaks of safety & peace – no war will happen again, the gates can be kept open in shalom.

One good resource to check out would be Andrew Perriman’s, “Hell and Heaven in Narrative Perspective.”

On that sentence you quoted of mine, it wasn’t stated the best. It should have said “that doesn’t stand up.” I updated it now.

If I “die to self” that is not judgement, but learning humility. If the “old man” (ego) dies, that is also not judgement, but an awakening to a new reality. Death means a transition from one state to another, not necessarily, or even EVER, final destruction or punishment. Even the death that is the wages of sin is a temporary spiritual reality — we LIVE in a state of “death” until we awaken (rise/be reborn) to our TRUE identity here and now.

Regarding the gates, it says the righteous go in and out of the city. Why are they going out if not to minister to the “unrighteous” (those not yet aligned with the truth) who are still OUTSIDE the gates? I believe this is speaking of now and for all time, not a final end-time scenario. WE (the church collective) are the New Jerusalem. OUR “gates” are never SHUT. We are always, being ministers of reconciliation, going “out” to reach the world with the Good News. Everyone is lost/dead/blind in sin (error/lies) until they hear and receive the truth of their life in Christ., and then THEY become part of the “city”.

If your position regarding the city gates and peace is from Periman, then I think both of you are still seeing this as some fashion of literal reality with a real city with gates. This is talking about spiritual matters, and using the METAPHOR of a city to describe a body of believers, just as Paul does when he calls the church a building that is “fitted together”. Similar ideas.

Ken, thanks for more interaction. I’d probably say it’s a stretch to equate the concept of “dying to self” and death itself.

With the gates being open, I’m trying to see where it talks about the righteous going in and out. Perhaps that’s implied? But it’s not stated as far as I can tell. So the idea of the righteous still ministering to the unrighteous is perhaps forced upon the text.

I don’t believe these images in Revelation are literal. But figurative.